Why are nonprofit organizations so often plagued by the very ills they aim to cure?  Read the article online, or download a PDF, and let us know what you think.

As Valerie Lies, President and CEO of the Donors Forum, described in her powerful opening remarks to the 600 guests of last week’s event, Chicago is struggling with many of the same economic and political challenges as the rest of the country.

I described La Piana Consulting’s NonprofitNext research and the five key trends that are converging to reshape the social sector landscape.

Joining the discussion was Mae Hong, Director of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Nicole Robinson, Director of Kraft Foods Global Community Involvement division, and Ricardo Estrada, Chicago’s First Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Family and Support Services.

The panel itself represented the future, with young and diverse leaders, whose affiliations spanned a blurring of sectors across government, philanthropic, and corporate social action.

Where will you take nonprofits next? Join the conversation today!

With our PONO partner, the Hawaii Community Foundation, this fall we will launch the Hawaii Emerging Leaders Program (HELP), which will adapt our proven leadership curriculum for non-CEO leaders in nonprofits in Hawaii. These are program directors, CFOs, development directors and other senior leaders who usually report to the executive director, and who may one day be executive directors themselves.

Looking towards the nonprofit sector’s next generation of emerging leaders, be sure to check out one of Rosetta Thurman’s latest blog posts, “11 Reasons Why New College Grads Should Pursue Nonprofit Careers” and Brent Copen’s recent post about the May 2010 HBR article “The Leaders We Need Now” at  our NonprofitNext blog.

The article was created by Leadership for a New Era, a collaborative research initiative launched by the Leadership Learning Community, and examines the assumptions behind current approaches to leadership development, principally a focus on individuals.

According to this piece, American society is fully bought into a view of leadership based on the following principles:

• Personal responsibility and individualism: The belief that people control their fates regardless of social position and that individual behaviors and choices determine material outcomes.

• Meritocracy: The belief that resources and opportunities are distributed according to talent and effort and that social components of “merit”—such as access to inside information of powerful social networks, are of lesser importance or do not matter.
• Equal opportunity: The belief that employment, education and wealth accumulation are “level playing fields” and that race is no longer a barrier to progress in these areas.

As a result, we ignore the underlying unfairness of in-crowd status that the majority culture enjoys. Essentially, everyone is expected to work from a level playing field but the field is anything but level. Yet people from other cultures and backgrounds (not Northern European) often do not have access to the networks and information that allow majority culture members to, or example, easily walk into a new work situation and know the “social rules” that will allow them to get ahead.

Where this set of observations is most poignant for me is in its ramifications for leadership development training. Leadership development that focuses on individuals, usually CEOs, assumes that everyone is in the same position relative to using the information gained from the experience. Yet the subtle ways in which dialogue, work processes and even humor in the work place are reinforcing of dominant culture practices does indeed make entry harder for others. An awareness of this dynamic, and efforts to bring together teams and communities for leadership development, could work against this bias.

A few weeks ago May’s center was inundated with ten feet of water in the first of four typhoons to hit her country in rapid succession. May was not present at the time but 250 school children were. Her staff bravely escorted the kids out of the building and onto buses before the flood arrived, but not in time for the staff themselves to escape. Several staff, wet, cold and hungry, were trapped in the building for 15 hours before rescue workers got to them. Fortunately, they all survived.

The center, built of concrete block, also survived, but was full of mud. The science exhibits were all destroyed. Since that day May has worked tirelessly to restore her center, support her staff, and return things as much to as possible to normal. And she lives up to her commitments.

May made it to our recent leadership program meeting in Texas, where she was hailed for her bravery by her fellow leaders. We all wish her the best as she returns home, with hopes that she continues to weather any future storms.

More recently, we also interviewed Peter as part of our NonprofitNext research initiative, and profiled the Tech Museum in the new Convergence report.

Peter was in Fort Worth to attend a reunion of his Noyce cohort in conjunction with the annual Association of Science and Technology Centers conference. I was in Fort Worth working with Cohort 2, and to do a workshop on governance at the same conference.

Simply put, Peter is brilliant. Originally trained in Germany as a watchmaker, he went on to earn a doctorate in science education and to lead the Deutsches Museum in Bonn as well as to work at the Getty and the Smithsonian. But I’m writing this post because I wanted to share his latest venture with you.

He calls it “Gallery Without Labels.” At each exhibit/experiment in the museum, instead of a placard explaining the thing, there is a video monitor. You choose the language you want and a child from that ethnic/language group comes on the monitor explaining how the exhibit works while he/she is actually doing it. This gets around language barriers and literacy levels. It makes everyone feel welcome. Apple is an underwriter. For added impact, in the lobby they have 30 video monitors with all the different kids doing their thing simultaneously. It models dynamic community engagement.

What better way to recruit the next generation of innovative museum goers than to show them leading the way?

This request made me start thinking about the evolution of leadership development in the field. When I was a 26 year old nonprofit leader I was pretty much expected to learn on my own, kind of a sink or swim approach. This was largely true of my generation: we had no specific management training (I had a BA and MA in comparative literature), and sometimes we had no actual experience in the field. We spent a lot of time on the phone asking other, slightly less clueless colleagues questions, and we grew organizations through a lot of trial and error.

This approach fit with my generation’s “do your own thing” approach to life but I am not so sure it benefited our organizations. Back then we figured things out but trial and error is costly when you are on the thin margins of a small nonprofit.

These days more nonprofit leaders have specific training, often a masters in business or public or nonprofit administration, and once in the job they increasingly participate in programs that further develop their leadership and management abilities.

It is more than a bit ironic that having never participated in or benefited from any leadership development effort when I was new to the field, I now spend a great deal of time leading these programs. I’m glad the sector and I have evolved and I look forward to where the next generation will lead us.

While this is taking place, virtually every nonprofit leader in America is either taking a pay cut or contemplating one, laying people off or contemplating the need to do so, and looking under the mat for spare change in an effort to keep essential services flowing. I don’t begrudge foundations paying their CEOs lots of money, even if the job cannot be anywhere near as hard as running a soup kitchen. What I do resent is the clamor every time a nonprofit leader asks for a raise or, after a lifetime of service, breaks six figures. No one goes into the nonprofit field for the money, but people do have to live.